Ideas, opinions, how-to's, and other discoveries related to virtually any product, but usually web products and often education technology products.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Building Buildings in Google Docs

Everyone who knows me knows how excited I get about collaboration - and how especially excited I was when Google Docs' drawing tool was launched as a collaborative editing surface. On a few occasions, I've initiated collaborative scribbling sessions with 3 or 30 people simultaneously, just for the creative kick we all get out of it (an especially active session was triggered by my favorite web-tech blogger, when her quick ping to her followers triggered a flood of creative participants).

When I saw the quality of content a few others had created when we added drawings to the Google Docs Template Gallery, I was inspired to try some myself. So, for a few moments (ahem) per day over the past week, I ventured on a more soloist approach in an attempt to create some useful and realistic-ish drawings of some great city landmark buildings. I initially set out to draw, in rough form, just the Empire State Building. Hmph... that was easy enough - so I just kept going. Transamerica was a bit more challenging, and the Space Needle required some artistic license. My favorite building (second of course to my real favorites), the Chrysler Building, almost made me cry give up - but I persisted and even got that into a form which (when squinting) is acceptable...

So the template drawing is in the gallery (full preview here) - enjoy it, use it, laugh at it, or make fun of my rare obsessive behavior which resulted in these drawings. Maybe next time I'll invite a few dozen of my closest artistic friends to collaboratively create every other landmark building in a tenth of the time ;)

Hello Jr, I am using your show n tell gadget...for charting some data...got a doubt..When i select a range from where the contents are picked up ,how do i hide the cell description that is coming on top of my chart .For you reference i am sharing the sheet where i have deployed you gadget.https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tIcgOiPALUIrrd2O5tCp4vg&waffle=false&forced=true#gid=0

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I'm a product manager at Google and a school board member in my local community, but, **this is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer or my school board.**